“[electric cars] are more reliable, for a start. The typical electric car has around 20 moving parts compared to the 2,000 or so in an internal combustion engine.

As a result electric vehicles also tend to last much longer. Most electric car manufacturers expect their vehicles to keep on going for at least 500,000 miles.”

I think the electric car part is right, and this will have far reaching effects on the US and the world. Think gas stations, oil companies, auto repair shops. This happened many times before. We used to go to the far ends of the earth to get whale oil. This large international industry also vanished almost over night, along with the sailors, shipbuilders and their associated support industries.

I differ a bit on the self-driving part though. I am still a skeptic of turning an automated car loose on the roads with a bunch of humans. Ultimately I can see transportation as a standardized service (think of how the internet is organized around standards). You will still have problems like malicious actors, but things will function pretty much like a decentralized version of public transportation.